PEER Center Comments: Financial Value Transparency

The Financial Value Transparency rules currently in effect with implementation already underway, will provide unprecedented new information to students, institutions, and policymakers about the return on investment of postsecondary education, and we urge the Department not to remove the rules or weaken these provisions (including by eliminating any of the required reporting elements).Under the FVT rules, all colleges, across all sectors, will report data needed to calculate whether each of their programs leaves the typical graduate with high debt or low earnings enabling students and their families to make informed decisions about whether and where to enroll in school and what to study, consistent with their goals and interests.

The Trump Administration now has the opportunity to take the next step in designing rich federal data and getting that information into the hands of students and their families. Already, the Education Department has taken key steps to establish data reporting systems and build the necessary infrastructure to assess performance for every institution and each of their programs. We encourage the Department to move quickly to produce those data, dedicating the necessary staff and resources to the task, and to ensure the data reach the students who need them and generate the transparency needed for a well-functioning market.